When the Welsh Assembly was approved in 1997 by a wafer-thin margin of 50.3% to 49.7%, it was for just 60 members elected by a silly iteration of the D’Hondt top up system.* This was because Wales wasn’t an important place and the Assembly wasn’t an important institution. Blair called it a ‘parish council’ and many parish councils felt slighted at the comparison.

The now Senedd Cymru by contrast is a fairly significant law making body with extensive powers over a wide variety of areas. Sixty isn’t many, and in fact when you reduce it to 58 for the Llywydd and her deputy it seems even less. Half of sixty (which is the most anyone has ever won) seems even less So there’s been a general feeling there need to be more members.

The original suggestion was for multi-member constituencies elected by STV. The 32 Welsh Parliamentary seats would be paired, and six members elected by STV from each of these sixteen resulting areas.

This would actually have been a very sensible idea. Among the few unmixed successes of the SNP is their reform of local government elections in Scotland, using this methodology. It would have allowed the people of Wales much greater say in choosing their AauS** and opened several areas (glares at the Valleys) to something akin to democracy for the first time.

But, this had a fundamental drawback. It would have put power in the hands of voters, not party machines. So Welsh Labour, a bunch of control freaks, and Plaid Cymru, anxious about the somewhat off-piste members they have recently put to the voters, thought this was undesirable. Instead, they combined to vote through the most undemocratic form of voting of them all – closed list PR. This means people have to chose a party, and have no choice over a candidate. Even if the candidate at the top is Alun Davies or Andrew RT Davies.

This also helpfully consolidates Labour’s hegemony by getting rid of potentially messy second preferences, which could have gone to undesirable parties like the Greens who might just possibly have preferred a Plaid government to a Labour one. Now, with what they hope will be the Labour block vote secure, they can look forward to another 25 years of government.

This also suited Plaid, who will be hoping to retake second place under PR by making inroads in seats in the Valleys, while seeing off challenges from the Tories elsewhere. This is of course why they voted for it.

It did not suit the Tories, who would have done much better under STV as the second largest party. But nobody listened to them because if there is a more nakedly opportunistic party in the whole UK than the Welsh Conservatives, I don’t know who they are (and I haven’t forgotten the DUP’s existence in saying that).

Somebody suggested that if Labour really wanted a full gerrymander then 96 FPTP seats was the way to go. Here I actually disagree. FPTP is not Labour’s friend in Wales, and but for the dithering of the Lib Dems in 2007 it would have pushed them from government. Their voters have shown an increasing disinclination to be taken for granted and in the recent past they have lost the Rhondda, Llanelli and Blaenau Gwent to charismatic opposition candidates, including the independents Peter and Trish Law. AS we have also seen, FPTP allows an unpopular party to get a sudden, brutal punishment beating. PR tends to be rather more gentle in its peaks and troughs.

Who’s the loser? The people of Wales. The Tories under Sunak were clapped out. But Welsh Labour under Vaughan Gething made them look like the early days of En Marche. A proper meltdown (I have successfully predicted the last 107 of 0 meltdowns) is long overdue, but under this system simply won’t happen. Meanwhile, the parties tighten their grip over the political area.

Y doethur

*More sensible iterations are available. In New Zealand they appoint additional top up (overhang) members to get close to proportionality with votes cast is reached, rather than sticking to a random fixed number.

**Aelodau Senedd – Members of (the Welsh) Parliament